Staring at the Sun

We can never fully see the sun. The most constant object in our field of view, and that which indeed allows the very possibility of vision, is visually unobtainable.

How much of what we see is actual? How much is fabricated? Staring at the Sun poses these questions through an immersive experience in which we are asked to consider the visible spectrum. Here, color is both perceived and produced by the body and mind. What we see reflects at once the light of the rainbow and its negative. The limits between the tangible and the imagined collapse into a dizzied blur of color and invisibility.

The Fabric of your Reflection

"The Fabric of Your Reflection reconfigures an image of an object onto the same object in space, creating multiple membranes of film, time, and space. Overlapping and deconstructing the virtual and the real enhances ones awareness of shifting realities and perception through experimentation, drawing the viewer into a psychedelic unknown. The resulting moving-image-object becomes an existential exploration of the infinite void: a saturated, sensual, wondrous encounter that offers boundless potential."

Afterimage

Although afterimages (or the impressions retained by the retina after exposure to light) form the basis for current theories of vision, this phenomenon still contains many unknowns. As far back as Goethe’s research on color perception, afterimages were seen as a crucial problem of visual perception: they provide undeniable proof of a deeply subjective experience of vision. To this day, they can be seen as key existentialist phenomena evidencing that reality, or the world we physically perceive, is not and can never be objective. With the work Afterimages, I set out to discover whether it would be possible to share our subjective experience of vision. Czech physician and biologist Jan Evangelista Purkinje attempted this in the early 1800s with drawing, but only through digital media and moving image can this interior vision be represented in an experiential way that comes close to how we see afterimages.

This work, created through blind drawings that are then animated, offer a record of my own afterimages. The viewer is offered the possibility to embody them as their own retinas retain the imagistic reproductions. In this way, the work provides a deep phenomenological experience where the viewer and artist share a subjective embodied experience of vision. Paradigms perhaps most important today with the advent of believable, simulated worlds, come into question: what are the eyes really perceiving, what is actually there?

Afterimage, video still, 2013.

After Image, c-print, 2013.

Levitating Scales

Installation of three parabolic mirror pairs and prisms inset in wall.2017

Prisms seem to be extruding from holes in the wall. Upon closer inspection, by intervening with touch it becomes clear what appeared to be a physical prism was but an illusion. Ironically, because the illusion can be seen in the round in three dimensions, it is called the "real image".

Propos du néant

Slide projection installation with anaglyph slides and glasses. Also available as a viewmaster and reel. Installation de diapositives stéréoscopique. 2014

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This installation reveals scenes constructed from photographs of the artist's 2013 journey across the North American West coast. The images' 3-dimensionality offers an immersive or hyperreal viewpoint, while concurrently pointing to zones of impossibility. Though the anaglyph glasses offer an invitation to interaction, the viewer's vantagepoint is beholden to the apparatus which changes images at its own randomized speed. The act of looking is complicated by rapid impressions of information and significant pauses or gaps of bright light, recalling the impossibility of an unmediated view of reality through fallible senses and modes of interpretation.

Perceptual Moment #8

Perceptual Moment #8 is an interactive installation using Pure Data and cameras as sensors. Considering Gilles Deleuze's writings on the moving image and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, I examine how the embodied viewing experience of digital moving-images compares to visual perception of the physical world to deconstruct ideologies delineating conscious experience from the imaginary. The viewers’ bodies are tracked within the gallery via webcam, and the sensorial data is transmitted back to the computer. If the viewer is standing still in order to view the video, the image slowly turns to generated “white noise.” White noise and the imaginary imagery it evokes can be situated as a device by which to investigate the eye’s relationship to consciousness. In certain flicker rates, as those controllable through generation, white noise has the capacity to bring the viewer’s own mental imagery to their line of sight, superimposed with reality. In order to fully access the video, the viewer must move in the gallery space, making the act of viewing more purposeful; subjectivity more tangible.